∧pex

Adoption Engine

The Adoption Engine turns "which users are stuck?" into an automatic, measured nudge program. You define adoption milestones from your own events and traits; Apex tracks who has adopted each feature, nudges the ones who haven't — the single next-best nudge per user — and measures the lift against a holdout.

An adoption milestone is not a goal. A goal is workspace-, experiment-, or journey-level success. A milestone is per-user, per-feature state: "has this end-user adopted feature X?"

Milestones

A milestone has:

  • Feature — a stable key (e.g. reporting) carried on the nudge event.
  • Adopted when — the predicate that means adopted: an event fired (report_run) or a trait value (plan = pro). Defined over your own event/trait catalog, so it works whether the signal comes from the web snippet, the mobile SDK, or your backend.
  • Gap policy — when an unmet milestone becomes worth nudging (e.g. 3 days after signup).
  • Priority — lower is nudged first.

Define milestones under Settings → Workspace → Analytics, beneath the Active User Definition — a milestone is the per-feature sibling of "what does activated mean".

How a user flows through it

Tracked

Every user with progress on a milestone is pending until they adopt it.

Adopted

When the user fires the milestone's event (or matches its trait), the milestone flips to adopted and stops. This is detected incrementally on ingest — no re-scan.

Nudged

If the gap window elapses and the user hasn't adopted, the daily sweep enrolls them in the milestone's nudge journey (email + bell). Only the single top-priority unmet milestone fires per user per cadence, so nobody gets spammed.

The holdout (why the number is honest)

A deterministic ~10% of users are held out: they are tracked but never nudged. Lift = adoption rate among nudged − adoption rate among the holdout. That's the counterfactual that separates "the nudge worked" from "they'd have adopted anyway." See the Adoption report under Engagement → Adoption.

Users currently in an active experiment are also excluded from nudges, so adoption nudges never contaminate your experiment results.

Info

Adoption nudges are marketing-class communications — they respect unsubscribe, opt-out, and frequency caps, and send through your journeys like any other message.

Next Steps

PreviousActivationNextRetention & Cohorts